Meditation: Going Beyond Logic
If you look at it logically, even getting out of bed in the morning will look like a huge feat. Then you have to brush your teeth, eat, work, eat, work, eat, sleep; again tomorrow morning the same thing. For the rest of your life you have to do the same thing over and over again. If you become extremely logical you will become depressed. With a logical mind you are trying to perceive the nature of life. Try as hard as you want, it is not going to happen. To perceive the nature of your life, you must be willing to look beyond the limitations of the logical mind. Otherwise it is going to be one long, endless, fruitless struggle.
This logical mind, which is the fundamental instrument through which you are trying to do everything, is only equipped to handle the duality of existence. If you as a being become dual, you become a constant struggle. Once you create this tension, and the more you logically think about it, the more tense you become.
All the sadhana, all the meditativeness that is prescribed on the spiritual path, is fundamentally to handle this logical mind which is building up a certain level of tension within you. If it is constantly strung tight, then the very life energy in you will become weak and lose its intensity and vibrancy over a period of time.
There is a very beautiful incident in the life of Aesop, the fable writer. One day he was playing bow and arrow with a few children. Aesop loved to play with children. A serious looking wise man looked at this and said, “What a waste of time for a grown up man to be playing with children! What is the purpose of wasting your life playing with children?” Aesop took a bow which was strung, unstrung it, put it on the floor and said, “This is the purpose. If you keep your bow constantly strung, over a period of time it loses its strength and intensity, and then it will be a no-good bow. If you want to retain the strength and intensity of your bow, you must unstring it sometimes. Only then it will be ready for use when you want it.”
That’s mediation, to unstring yourself—unstringing yourself of the tension the logic is creating within you. Every kind of logic builds a certain tension. Once there is logic, there is room for argument, isn’t it? If you become extremely logical, you become horribly argumentative. So meditation is a way of unstringing this. Letting the mind just be there without employing the logical distortion. If your mind learns to just simply be there, it becomes like the piece of a mirror. The beauty of the mirror is, a mirror has no face of its own. Logic has a face of its own. Everybody has their own kind of logic. Why two people can argue endlessly about the same issue—simply because everybody’s logic has its own face. However, a mirror has no face: in this little piece of mirror, you can reflect the whole mountain. Once the mind goes beyond the duality of logic, it becomes like a mirror which can contain the whole existence, the creation and the creator. All the sadhana is just towards this.
Fundamentally all sadhana is aimed at ironing out the logical mind, so that you become like a piece of mirror; you can reflect anything. If God comes here, he can also be contained in you. The sun … anything can be contained in you because you have no face of your own. Spiritual sadhana does not mean you making yourself into something other than what you are. Spiritual sadhana simply means erasing the false faces that you have created for yourself, so the mind becomes like a plain mirror which reflects everything just the way it is, without any distortions.
| Named one of India’s 50 most influential people, Sadhguru speaks before millions annually around the globe, including to prominent leadership forums such as the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, TED, and the World Peace Congress. From groundbreaking yoga programs to projects for rural communities and the environment, Sadhguru’s Isha Foundation (www.IshaFoundation.org) serves as a thriving model for human empowerment, which is reflected in the Foundation’s special consultative status with the UN. |
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